'I don't want your money, Honey: I want your Time.'
'I don't dig.'
'You want fix? You want straight? You wanta, nooood?'
The Sailor cradled something pink and vibrated out of focus.
'Yeah.'
'We'll take the Independent. Got their own special heat, don't carry guns only saps. I recall, me and the Fag fell once in Queen's Plaza. Stay away from Queen's Plaza, son... evil spot... fuzz haunted. Too many levels. Heat flares out from the broom closet high on ammonia like burning lions... fall on poor old lush worker, scare her veins right down to the bone. Her skin pop a week or 100
do that five-twenty-nine kick handed out free and gratis by NYC to jostling junkies.... So Fag, Beagle, Irish, Sailor beware! Look down, look down along that line before you travel there....' The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron.
101
THE EXTERMINATOR DOES A GOOD JOB
The Sailor touched the door gently, following patterns of painted oak in a slow twist, leaving faint, iridescent whorls of slime. His arm went through to the elbow. He pulled back an inside bolt and stood aside for the boy to enter.
Heavy, colorless smell of death filled the empty room.
'The trap hasn't been aired since the Exterminator fumigated for coke bugs,' said the Sailor apologetically.
The boy's peeled senses darted about in frenzied exploration. Tenement flat, railroad flat vibrating with silent motion. Along one wall of the kitchen a metal trough --or was it metal, exactly?
--ran into a sort of aquarium or tank half-filled with translucent green fluid. Moldy objects, worn out in unknown service, littered the floor: a jock-strap designed to protect some delicate organ of flat, fan-shape; multi-levelled trusses, supports and bandages; a large U-shaped yoke of porous pink stone; little lead tubes cut open at one end.
Currents of movement from the two bodies stirred stagnant odor pools; atrophied boy-smell of dusty locker rooms, swimming pool chlorine, dried semen. Other smells curled through pink convolutions, touching unknown doors.
The Sailor reached under the wash-stand and extracted a package in wrapping paper that shredded and fell from his fingers in yellow dust. He laid out dropper, needle and spoon on a table covered with dirty dishes. But no roach antennae felt for the crumbs of darkness.
'The Exterminator does a good job,' said the Sailor. 'Almost too good, sometimes.' He dipped into a square tin of yellow pyretheum powder and pulled out a flat package covered in red and gold Chinese paper.
'Like a firecracker package,' the boy thought. At fourteen lost two fingers.... Fourth of July fireworks accident... later, in the hospital, first silent proprietary touch of junk.
'They go off, here, kid.' The Sailor put a hand to the back of his head. He camped obscenely as he opened the package, a complex arrangement of slots and overlays.
'Pure, one hundred per cent H. Scarcely a man is now alive... and it's all yours.'
'So what you want off me?'
'Time.'
'I don't dig.'
'I have something you want,' his hand touched the package. He drifted away into the front room, his voice remote and blurred. 'You have something I want... five minutes here... an hour someplace else... two ...four... eight... Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.... Every day die a little.... It takes up The Time....'
He moved back into the kitchen, his voice loud and clear: 'Five years a piece. Nobody gives a better deal on the street.' He put a finger on the dividing line below the boy's nose. 'Right down the middle.'
'Mister, I don't know what you're talking about.'
